From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 07 Mar 2003 - 13:05:07 GMT
Lovely stuff, the kind of things that makes the list worthwhile, thanks
Bill.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: William Benzon
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Wednesday, March 5, 2003 6:22 PM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: rock art
>
> on 3/5/03 10:51 AM, Vincent Campbell at VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk wrote:
>
> > Hi Scott,
> >
> > <I was referring to limitations of using artificats to extrapolate
> > about the
> >> culture from which these artifacts came.>
> >>
> > You're absolutely right about this, a very good example being cave
> > paintings where we have found out all sorts of stuff about how they were
> > made, and _hypothesised_about what they were_for_ but no-ones knows for
> > certain. However, we can extrapolate to a reasonable degree certain
> > probable associations. For example, people of that time were hunter
> > gatherers, the vast majority of paintings are of animals, therefore
> there
> > must be some relationship between those two things. Given the
> inaccessible
> > places, and very difficult conditions in whihc the paintings were
> produced
> > (these weren't caves people lived in) it's reasonable to assume that
> these
> > paintings weren't just idle doodles, but important in some way, perhaps
> > tied to rituals and beliefs asssociated with the hunter gatherer
> lifestyle.
>
> I've got an essay-review coming out in the first issue of Evolutionary
> Psychology. One of the 2 books under review is about rock art:
>
> James L. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to
> Archaeology, AltaMira Press, 2002; ISBN: 0759101558
>
> Here's what I say about Pearson's book:
>
> Pearson considers the rock art found at thousands of cave and cliff sites
> around the world, with some sites having hundreds or thousands of images.
> What do those images represent, who put them there, and why? If we could
> travel back in time, we could answer these questions through direct
> observation. As time travel is impossible, we must get at these questions
> indirectly, through inference based on things we can observe and processes
> we do understand.
>
> Thus Pearson begins his book with a discussion of archaeological method,
> noting that American archaeologists of the early twentieth century focused
> on 3locating, excavating, recording, and describing findings at individual
> sites2 (p. 2). We thus have descriptions of the bone fragments, pot
> shards,
> weapons and tools, seeds, and so forth found at specific sites. Then the
> focus shifted toward establishing chronologies for the artifacts and
> sites,
> thus giving us the foundation for thinking about regional prehistories.
> This led to functional interpretations of artifacts in terms of the
> lifeways
> of ancient peoples. How did these people live their lives? What did they
> eat, what were their travel routes, how many lived at a site, and so
> forth.
> During the 1960s archaeologists began forging a New Archaeology interested
> in making demographic and ecological arguments about the forces driving
> historical change. These thinkers, however, were not interested in rock
> art.
> For it could not readily be interpreted in the adaptationist terms they
> favored.
>
> Which is not to say that no one had been interested in rock art. On the
> contrary, many have been fascinated by rock art since the first major
> discoveries in the caves of Altamira in the late nineteenth century. But
> it
> is only relatively recently that the subject has been intellectually
> respectable. Various approaches were pursed in explicating the art: 3art
> for
> art1s sake, totemic, hunting and fertility magic, and modern structuralist
> theories2 (p. 44). André Leroi-Gourhan is the major proponent of
> structuralist analysis: he treated displays as coherent multi-image
> compositions rather than as a miscellaneous collection of individual
> images.
> He analyzed the distribution of image types and argued that they reflected
> the mythical universe of people capable of fully human thought. Then,
> starting in the early 1980s, David Lewis-Williams began arguing that 3the
> painted motifs referred to the supernatural visions and experiences that
> medicine men received while in altered states of consciousness2 (p. 49).
> Why would anyone think that?
>
> There had been quite a bit of research on hallucinations in general, and
> drug-induced hallucinations in particular, back in the 1960s and 1970s
> (cf.
> Siegel and West 1975). One of the observations that emerged from this
> literature is that hallucinatory 3trips2 typically go through three
> phases.
> In the first of these phases imagery is dominated by geometric forms of
> various kinds, such as grids, spirals, and zigzags. The second phase
> consists of 3culturally meaningful images, perceived as recognizable
> shapes
> of people, animals, and monsters2 (p. 88). During the third phase image
> types from the first two phases become blended together.
>
> The geometric forms of the first and third phases seem to be derived from
> the inherent computational geometry of the nervous system. You do not,
> however, have to take psychoactive drugs to see these so-called entopic
> forms. You can evoke them by closing your eyes and gently applying
> pressure
> to your eyeballs. At some point you will begin to see brightly colored
> patterns which will shimmer and evolve as you maintain pressure. These are
> the kinds of geometric forms which appear in the first and third phases of
> trips.
>
> Geometric forms quite similar to these entopic forms are prominent in rock
> art in widely separated areas-much of the original analysis was based on
> images found at sites in South African and the American West. Further,
> some
> rock art is known to have been created in historical times and there are
> references in the ethnographic literature from informants asserting that
> the
> images depict dreams (p. 86). While this certainly does not imply that all
> rock art has a similar origin, it does lend plausibility to the visionary
> case.
>
> With this argument in mind, however provisional it may be, let us return
> to
> Weston La Barre1s ideas. After having talked about culture shock and
> sensory
> deprivation he went on to observe (p. 60): 3The fact that he dreams first
> forces on man the need to epistemologize.2 Our own view of dreams is so
> thoroughly psychologized that we can easily think of them as just
> something
> the mind/brain does. How do dreams appear to people who, lacking the
> explanatory and theoretical machinery of modern psychology and
> neuroscience,
> cannot psychologize them? Why think about dreams at all; why not simply
> forget about them? What structures and processes must a brain have if it
> is
> to remember both dream events and real events, to compare them, note the
> differences, and wonder about those differences? It seems to me that
> people
> lacking the interpretive buffering of this psychologized view of the world
> might well see dreams as genuine journeys to another realm. When were our
> ancestors able to do this?
>
> I suggest that they were so doing at least 30,000 years ago, if not
> before,
> for that is the age of the rock art at Chauvet Cave in France (p. 79). To
> be sure, even if Pearson is correct, carving or painting rock art is not
> quite the same as talking about dreams as experiences in some other world,
> but the activities are in the same general domain. Given that the shaman
> actively induces visions through a combination of song, dance, and drugs,
> creating rock art would seem to be the more strenuous activity. It is
> through this activity that the shaman gains access to the dream world, one
> typically treated as being more real than the mundane world (cf. Pearson
> p.
> 108). He seeks active control rather than the mere recall of dreams.
> This makes the shaman something of a metaphysician. To be sure, he is not
> a
> metaphysician in the style of Socrates, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Dennett,
> or
> Derrida, but his socially sanctioned ritual activity has a metaphysical
> dimension. He is the one who has mastered reality and so can travel to
> other
> worlds and there gain knowledge to help his tribesmen in the here and now.
> However they appear to us, shamans function as healers, weather-makers,
> story-tellers, and historians, and musicians to their own people (cf.
> Winkelman 1992). We might think of them as specializing in symbolic
> integrity, for it is their job to maintain the vitality of the symbol
> system
> that defines the order of the world.
>
> This whole story, La Barre1s and Pearson1s, is conjectural, but the
> conjectures are about important matters that have yet to attract consensus
> explanations that are well-argued and documented by appropriate
> intellectual
> specialists. For that I reason I think they merit our further attention.
> By contrast, this story is quite different from the one David Sloan Wilson
> tells about religion. He isn1t interested in symbolism or ritual. He1s
> interested in moral behavior and group formation. From his point of view
> 3religious belief gives an authority to the system that it would not have
> as
> a purely secular institution2 (p. 130). While he recognizes that all
> religious system are replete with symbolism, he sees it as a component of
> the psychological mechanisms through which moral behavior in inculcated in
> group members. Symbolism is merely instrumental. I do not, however, see
> that
> there is any deep conflict between the position that the human brain has a
> need for order that can be satisfied by religious symbolism and Wilson1s
> argument about group behavior. On the contrary, my view might provide a
> way
> of explicitly accounting for the authority symbolism affords the moral
> order.
>
>
>
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